I hosted an internal session on Patterns & Practices Prism (or Composite Application Guidance) and one of the attendees asked if there was a way I could avoid showing the application’s shell in its unpopulated state whilst the Modules load.

There are a number of ways of doing this but I thought I’d share the approach I use in one of my applications.

Now, there’s obviously going to be some delay to your app whilst Prism loads your modules, or you wouldn’t be here, and we don’t want to risk the user trying to start multiple instances of the application or wondering what’s going on – so let’s show a Splash screen.

I chose to implement the splash screen inside my Prism bootstrapper where I create the Shell. Here’s the typical code